1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to internet data security and in particular to data security for defined user spaces having devices that connect via a network portal/gateway to a larger public network.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the world continues to evolve technologically, an increasingly growing number of business people perform portions of their work from locations that are remote from their business offices/workplace. Employees and owners in different sizes of businesses, ranging from small businesses to large corporate organizations, often perform a significant portion of their work on internet-connected devices from their home. That work can involve and/or require collaboration with others, email exchanges, remotely accessing an enterprise/business network, synching with a business server or cloud-based storage, etc., all tasks that require the user have access to the internet. In a large number of these situations, the home based user has a gateway device (or gateway) installed within the home to provide the access of the user's mobile and home devices to the Internet, which is a public network. These home access points can provide connectivity for user computers, and other home based devices, such as phones, televisions, security systems, etc., to the public network.
Typically, some basic security protections for the local network can be provided at the gateway in the form of filtering communications initiated from the internet and obscuring discovery of the various connected mobile and home devices. However, these security protections do not filter the actual data that is coming in from the public network or the data that is being transmitted out from the home onto the public network. These gateways fail to protect the download of malware or the subsequent transmissions of malware, nor do they stay current on other rapidly evolving internet threats, leaving the home network and devices vulnerable. The user's device can be easily infected or hacked due to its unprotected access to the public network while at home.
Increasingly, enterprise businesses are being made vulnerable to attacks that can occur outside of the safety zone of the on-site, secured local area network that has a team of information technology (IT) personnel and/or embedded protections design to prevent external access to the data being shared within the network. While some larger enterprises provide their employees with a mechanism for creating a secure tunnel back to the enterprise network (e.g., through use of a secure virtual private network (VPN)), the majority of businesses do not have this feature available. And, even when deploying remote employees with these “secure” VPN connections, the company can still be at risk of infiltration because of the vulnerability (or lesser security) that exists at the end user connection to the network via the home gateway device. More importantly, with the employees remotely connecting in, from home using their at-home gateway, the vulnerability of the business to these attacks is an unknown quantity.